/$ Come, night; come Romeo; come, thou day in night; For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night Whiter than new snow on a raven's back: Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night, Give me my Romeo; and when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun. $/ (_ββ_) The similes of epic poetry as they come before us over and over again in Homer stand out in a marked contrast to the above type of almost purely lyrical simile in which sentiment is absorbed in the heart of its content. In the former case the aim of the poet, when he may by any chance wish to dally with the comparative mode around some specific object, is, on the one hand, interested in raising us over the active curiosity, expectancy, hope, and fear, by which we are moved relatively to the several situations and exploits of his heroes during the actual progress of events over, that is to say, the general concurrencies of cause, action, and consequence, and in fixing our attention upon the images which he places before us in their plastic repose, purely for our contemplation, serene as the works of sculpture. This repose, this absolution from the merely practical interest that we may enter into that which he places visibly before our eyes comes upon us with all the more force in so far as everything with which he compares the object is taken from a field entirely remote from it. Moreover, this halting round the simile possesses the further significance that by virtue of this kind of twofold painting of the same object its importance is emphasized, and is thus not permitted to be whirled away in the mere shifting stream of the song and the events it celebrates. Take, for example, what Homer says of Achilles, when that hero, fired with anger, confronts Aeneas ("Iliad," XX, vv. 164-175): /$ As when the harmful king of beasts (sore threatened to be slain By all the country up in arms) at first makes coy disdain Prepare resistance, but at last when anyone hath led Bold charge upon him with his dart, he then turns yawning head, Fell anger lathers in his jaws, his great heart swells, his stern Lasheth his strength up, sides and thighs waddle with stripes to learn Their own power, his eyes glow, he roars, he leaps to kill, Secure of killing: so his power then rous'd up to his will Matchless Achilles, coming on to meet Anchises' son[106]. $/ Much in the same spirit he speaks of Pallas, when she averted the arrow which Pandaros had let fly against Menelaus ("Iliad," IV, vv. 130-131): "She did not forget him, and warded off the arrow e'en as a mother flicks away some fly from her son, as he lies in sweet slumber." And again further on when the arrow, notwithstanding, wounds Menelaus (vv. 141-146):